#186 Reimagining men

Dear all,

I had an unexpected adventure this month, getting invited to attend a conference of the Global Alliance for Banking on Values in Vancouver—600 wonderful people from all over the world, working passionately to build and maintain financial institutions that serve people and the planet. It really required me to reassess my stereotypes about bankers (!), and I’m full of wondering about how we can work together toward a new monetary system where the creation and distribution of money is more aligned with the common good.

One of the things I love about February is our family tradition of reaching widely to loved ones with a Valentine letter. It always reminds me of how many loved ones I have!  If you didn’t get a copy and would like one, just let me know.

Love,
Pamela






Reimagining men

There is a big soft spot in my heart for men. The warmth and welcome I received from some of the dads in my community growing up was like water in a parched land. The man who taught our Sunday School class when I was thirteen opened a rare and precious space by actually listening to what was on our hearts and minds. A male mentor saw what I was capable of as a young adult, and guided me toward a sense of self-worth and a life of meaning. I have an unfailingly loving and supportive partner and many dear male friends. I will never be confused about the goodness that can be found in men.

That said, it’s hard to see them so lost as a group—and to see so many men behaving so badly. It is heartbreaking to take in the damage that has been done in this world by men wielding power. As their right to behave badly is beginning to be called out, it is painful to watch the fear that such a challenge evokes.

The training in entitlement runs so deep. How many men believe that they have a right to have their way, and that behaving like jerks with women is the natural order of things? Their outrage at a challenge to the assumptions that are at the core of their very identity is understandable. Such men are facing the unimaginable prospect of losing the only world they know, the world that has always been theirs.

The latest challenges to men’s right to behave badly (the right of white men in positions of power most particularly) follow a whole series of attacks on their status. Their “natural right” to be in charge of our country is being attacked on all sides. Black people are just not staying down, despite the best efforts of Jim Crow and mass incarceration. The tide of immigrants of color is seemingly unstoppable. And now the women—including white women who “should” be standing at their sides—are starting to turn against them.

As their control is increasingly challenged, it’s not surprising that the response is to hold on more tightly.  Don’t we all do that when we feel we might lose our grip? So we see men in positions of power and privilege sacrificing their brothers while trying desperately to hang on to every bit of control within their reach.  

It’s not easy to see the good in such men. Yet it has to be true that there’s a place for every human being in the world we seek. We were all born good and innocent, openhearted and reaching for connection. Society has played a cruel trick on our men, training them in the ways of power while cutting off avenues for real closeness. It’s only within this context that we can begin to understand the little boy longings that get played out so disastrously in grown men—and the strength it takes to stay human in the face of that training.

I see an opportunity here for women to claim a much bigger power than we may ever have dreamed possible. We don’t want to set our sights too low, and see victory in breaking into traditionally male positions of power. How many women have felt compelled to take on male patterns of behavior in the name of liberation? Nobody will win by women following the men. We have to be in the lead. We have to see right through the entitlement, the quest for control, the reliance on violence, to the sweet little boys hidden deep inside. We have to stand to their bad behavior without ever being confused about their innate goodness—and expect them to change. In this scenario, everybody wins.





Laying claim

A winter of obstacles
dark mornings
cold and rain
trips away
big deadlines
a bout with pneumonia
so much catching up…

But now, this morning
I head out
in unexpected cold
marking my territory
sweet and familiar
like a dog.

My corner
my streets
my park
my neighbors

My birds that sing
my trees that will bud
my sky
my world, all of it.





Dare to imagine: A new economy is possible!
Germany’s public development bank

Germany, the world leader in renewable energy, has a public-sector development bank called KfW which, along with Germany’s nonprofit Sparkassen banks, has largely funded the country’s green energy revolution. Initially funded by the United States through the Marshall Plan in 1948, KfW is now one of the world’s largest development banks, with more than $500 billion in assets.

Unlike private commercial banks, KfW does not have to focus on maximizing short-term profits for its shareholders while ignoring external costs. The bank has been free to support the energy revolution by funding major investments in renewable energy and energy efficiency. Its key role in the green energy revolution has been played within a public policy framework under Germany’s renewable energy legislation, including policy measures that have made investment in renewables commercially attractive.

Renewable energy in Germany is mainly based on wind, solar and biomass. Renewables generated 41 percent of the country’s electricity in 2017, up from just 6 percent in 2000; and public banks provided over 72 percent of the financing for this transition.   https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-financial-secret-behind-germanys-green-energy-revolution/





Some things that have made me hopeful recently

An African American Quaker elder who is making real a dream of medicinal herb production for marginalized members of the African diaspora.
https://www.quakerearthcare.org/sites/quakerearthcare.org/files/bfc/bfc3201_web.pdf (scroll to p.6)

All the bankers in the Global Alliance for Banking on Values who are dedicated to working for the common good.
http://www.gabv.org/about-us

The White Earth Band of Ojibwe’s adoption of a law recognizing the rights of wild rice, the first law to recognize the rights of a plant species. 
https://celdf.org/2019/02/the-rights-of-wild-rice/

Sheila Watt-Clothier, and her depth of understanding of the importance to the rest of the world of the Arctic and the Inuit communities who call it home.
https://www.rightlivelihoodaward.org/laureates/sheila-watt-cloutier/





Resources

Money, Debt and Liberation
A video of a talk I gave at Pendle Hill in January, 2017
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f7nP8eJ5vy8


Money and Soul
A transcript of a keynote address I delivered at a Quaker conference in New Mexico, June 2017
https://westernfriend.org/media/money-and-soul-unabridged


Toward a Right Relationship with Finance 
A book that I co-authored on Debt, Interest, Growth and Security.

The growth economy is failing to provide equitable well-being for humanity and a life-sustaining future for Earth.  However our institutional endowments and individual retirement are dependent on that same growth economy.  This book:
    • offers background on our current economic system--how it is based on unearned income on the one hand and debt on the other, with a built-in momentum toward economy inequality and ecological overshoot;
    • frames the conversation within the context of our deepest values and beliefs;
    • suggests plausible and historically grounded alternatives to the current system, particularly with regard to financing retirement; and
    • invites everyone to imagine new forms of durable economic and social security, and to help create the relationships and institutions that will make them a reality.
With many people now counting as never before on the performance of Wall Street for retirement security, how can this system be challenged with integrity and effectiveness?  Can we break with our dependence on financial speculation and build up new structures of security in a transformed, life-centered economy?

To order the book, or read it on line, go to http://www.quakerinstitute.org/?page_id=5 and scroll down.



More resources

www.findingsteadyground.org

Resource from my friend Daniel Hunter, Building a Movement to End the New Jim Crow; An Organizing Guide.  http://www.danielhunter.org/books/building-movement-end-new-jim-crow-organizing-guide 

Posts on other web/blog sites:

In http://www.classism.org/gifts-american-dream/, Pamela Haines locates her family's homey DIY celebrations on a class spectrum of different connections to upward mobility.

            http://www.transitionus.org/blog/unlikely-suspects-–-deep-outreach-diverse-initiating-groups-–-pace-building-trust

        http://www.classism.org/demolition-derby

Muscle Building for Peace and Justice; a Non-Violent Workout Routine for the 21st Century--an integration of much of my experience and thinking over the years:  https://www.trainingforchange.org/publications/muscle-building-peace-and-justice-nonviolent-workout-routine-21st-century (or just google the title)

The Gift of Loving

A friend has asked me to re-post a piece I wrote in 2004, in celebration of Valentines Day. Here it is.

I’ve always known that the opportunity to love is a gift, that loving unconditionally is the biggest perk of parenthood.  I also know that it is easily obscured by work and worry, by accumulated disappointments and assaults on our sense of goodness.  I’m seeing that gift these days unadorned—stark in its power and beauty.

Some of you may remember Chino, the young man in Nicaragua who claimed my son as a brother and me, by extension, sight unseen, as his mother.  I knew enough to take that claim seriously, and when I met him he was not hard to love.  I knew little about his home life—only that it was not happy.  Since our common language was my limited Spanish, we couldn’t speak in detail.  Intention, body language and tone of voice were as important as words.  I would sit outside in the early mornings watching the world go by, he would come over from down the street and I would welcome him to my side.

As I sit here thousands of miles away, remembering those times, I think of how simple and profound a welcome can be—an open smile, open heart, open arms.  I hadn’t realized how starved a life can be for such a welcome.  I hadn’t thought that I was giving a gift.

At the airport, as I was leaving Nicaragua, my attention was mostly for my first born.  He was lonely, weighed down by responsibilities there, needing places to let down and complain.  I did my best to invite Chino to that role, to be a resource for my loved one.  His mind was on other things.  He asked, rather wistfully, “Vas a regalarme?”, literally, “Are you going to gift me?”  I was a little taken aback.  I’m not much into presents and I had nothing there to give.  When I asked if he wanted anything in particular he mentioned a nose stud, something unavailable in Nicaragua.  So my first act as his mother back home was to go the teen rebel part of town, find a body piercing store and spend good money for strange adornment.  The alternative—not gifting him—seemed worse.  I sent a loving postcard, included his gift in a letter to my son, and wondered what else I could do.  Though I didn’t forget, my life quickly filled back up with all the responsibilities and relationships of home.

Finally a letter came.  With my poor Spanish and his poor handwriting and spelling, I wasn’t sure I understood.  But I was afraid I did.  He was not happy.  He had been drinking, doing bad things.  He wondered if his life was worth living.  I was the only one he could tell.  All of a sudden this situation was transformed, from a sweet cross-cultural claim of connection to the real thing.  This young man needed a mother now, seriously, for real—and he had chosen me.

I got help confirming my fears of what his letter said, and started wording Spanish phrases in my mind.  How could I use that blunt instrument—at a distance—in this time of exquisitely fragile human need?  It helped enormously that he sent an e-mail soon after, both reassuring me that he was doing a little better, and offering a more direct way to be in touch.

The only way I knew how to compensate for all the inadequacies of the situation was to offer love without limit.  I loved him more than anything in the world, and with all my heart.  When he thought about drinking, could he think instead of drinking in my love?  I stayed up late that night, forming my sentences, trying to forge our connection and my love into something that could work for him.

He was in my mind constantly the next day and the day after.  At breaks in a busy work week I thought of other things I might say.  I invited him to rewrite history with me, to have me there in his memory, every morning of his unloved childhood and every evening.  I used the dictionary, started sentences over when I ran into verb construction I couldn’t handle, prayed that my best would be good enough.

He wrote back, full of love for his mama.  Miraculously, something of what I intended had gotten through.  I wrote again, profligate in my love, saying things I would never say to my birth children, where a look or a touch would do, and anything more would be an embarrassment to us both. This narrow window of contact required me to offer as big a love as I knew how.  Perhaps it was just as well that I couldn’t be subtle in Spanish, and that in its unfamiliarity I could try out a new, more extravagant persona.

We have been exchanging professions of undying love all summer.  He has stopped drinking.  I feel like I’m living in the middle of a miracle.  Everything else is stripped away to reveal the simple and stark truth--that my love matters.